Benefit cost analysis applied to behavioral and engineering safety countermeasures in San Francisco, California

The state of the practice in safety has advanced rapidly in recent years with the emergence of new tools and processes for improving selection of the most cost-effective safety countermeasures. However, many challenges prevent fair and objective comparisons of countermeasures applied across safety disciplines (e.g. engineering, emergency services, and behavioral measures). These countermeasures operate at different spatial scales, are funded often by different financial sources and agencies, and have associated costs and benefits that are difficult to estimate. This research proposes a methodology by which both behavioral and engineering safety investments are considered and compared in a specific local context. The methodology involves a multi-stage process that enables the analyst to select countermeasures that yield high benefits to costs, are targeted for a particular project, and that may involve costs and benefits that accrue over varying spatial and temporal scales. The methodology is illustrated using a case study from the Geary Boulevard Corridor in San Francisco, California. The case study illustrates that: 1) The methodology enables the identification and assessment of a wide range of safety investment types at the project level; 2) The nature of crash histories lend themselves to the selection of both behavioral and engineering investments, requiring cooperation across agencies; and 3) The results of the cost-benefit analysis are highly sensitive to cost and benefit assumptions, and thus listing and justification of all assumptions is required. It is recommended that a sensitivity analyses be conducted when there is large uncertainty surrounding cost and benefit assumptions.

The Future of the World's Forests

Forest regulation is never far from the headlines. The recent COP 18 negotiations held in Doha towards the end of 2012 were criticized by observers for slowing the development of the ‘REDD+’ initiative and for marking the end of ‘Forest Day’, whilst in the last month controversy has arisen following reports that the World Bank’s investment in forestry-related projects has failed to address poverty or benefit local communities. Dr Rowena Maguire’s research focuses on international climate and forest regulation and indigenous and community groups rights and responsibilities in connection with environmental management. Her new book, Global Forest Governance, identifies the fundamental legal principles and governance requirements of Sustainable Forest Management, an introduction to which is provided in her article below.

Disaster resilience and local adaptation capacity in coastal Queensland

The 2011 floods illustrated once again Queensland’s vulnerability to flooding and similar disasters. Climate change will increase the frequency and magnitude of such events and will have a variety of other impacts. To deal with these impacts governments at all levels need to be prepared and work together. Like the rest of the nation most of the population of the state is located in the coastal areas and these areas are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This paper examines climate change adaptation efforts in coastal Queensland. The aim is increasing local disaster resilience of people and property through fostering coordination between local and state government planning activities in coastal high hazard areas. By increasing the ability of local governments and state agencies to coordinate planning activities, we can help adapt to impacts of climate change. Towards that end, we will look at the ways that these groups currently interact, especially with regard to issues involving uncertainty related to climate change impacts. Through an examination of climate change related activities by Queensland’s coastal local governments and state level planning agencies and how they coordinate their planning activities at different levels we aim to identify the weaknesses of the current planning system in responding to the challenges of climate change adaptation and opportunities for improving the ways we plan and coordinate planning, and make recommendations to improve resilience in advance of disasters so as to help speed up recovery when they occur.

Framing local stories for community consumption facilitation and evaluation in narrative driven arts-based projects

Cyclone Yasi struck the Cassowary Coast of Queensland in the early hours of Feb 3, 2011, destroying many homes sand property, including the destruction of the Cardwell and district historical society’s premises. With their own homes flattened, many were forced to live in mobile accommodation, with extended family, or leave altogether. The historical society members however were more devastated by their flattened foreshore museum and loss of their collection material. A call for assistance was made through the OHAA Qld branch, who along with QUT sponsored a trip to somehow plan how they could start to pick up the pieces to start again. This presentation highlights the need for communities to gather, preserve and present their own stories, in a way that is sustainable and meaningful to them, but that good advice and support along the way is important. Two 2 day workshops were held in March and then September, augmented by plenty of email correspondence and phone calls in between. Participants learnt that if they could conduct quality oral history interviews, they could later use these in many exhibitable ways including: documentary pieces; digital stories; photographic collections; creative short stories; audio segments –while also drawing closely together a suffering community. This story is not only about the people who were interviewed about the night Yasi struck, but the amazing women (all over 50) of the historical society who were willing to try and leap the digital divide that faces older Australians, especially those in rural Australia, so that their older local stories would not be lost and so that new stories could also be remembered.

‘The health-location connection’: using GIS and social media on smartphones to track engagement with the Local urban environment for work, recreation, and physical activity

A technologically innovative study was undertaken across two suburbs in Brisbane, Australia, to assess socioeconomic differences in women's use of the local environment for work, recreation, and physical activity. Mothers from high and low socioeconomic suburbs were instructed to continue with usual daily routines, and to use mobile phone applications (Facebook Places, Twitter, and Foursquare) on their mobile phones to ‘check-in’ at each location and destination they reached during a one-week period. These smartphone applications are able to track travel logistics via built-in geographical information systems (GIS), which record participants’ points of latitude and longitude at each destination they reach. Location data were downloaded to Google Earth and excel for analysis. Women provided additional qualitative data via text regarding the reasons and social contexts of their travel. We analysed 2183 ‘check-ins’ for 54 women in this pilot study to gain quantitative, qualitative, and spatial data on human-environment interactions. Data was gathered on distances travelled, mode of transport, reason for travel, social context of travel, and categorised in terms of physical activity type – walking, running, sports, gym, cycling, or playing in the park. We found that the women in both suburbs had similar daily routines with the exception of physical activity. We identified 15% of ‘check-ins’ in the lower socioeconomic group as qualifying for the physical activity category, compared with 23% in the higher socioeconomic group. This was explained by more daily walking for transport (1.7kms to 0.2kms) and less car travel each week (28.km to 48.4kms) in the higher socioeconomic suburb. We ascertained insights regarding the socio-cultural influences on these differences via additional qualitative data. We discuss the benefits and limitations of using new technologies and Google Earth with implications for informing future physical and social aspects of urban design, and health promotion in socioeconomically diverse cities.

QoS differentiation in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks for real-time control

IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area networks (WLANs) are being increasingly deployed for soft real-time control applications. However, they do not provide quality-ofservice (QoS) differentiation to meet the requirements of periodic real-time traffic flows, a unique feature of real-time control systems. This problem becomes evident particularly when the network is under congested conditions. Addressing this problem, a media access control (MAC) scheme, QoS-dif, is proposed in this paper to enable QoS differentiation in IEEE 802.11 networks for different types of periodic real-time traffic flows. It extends the IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) by introducing a QoS differentiation method to deal with different types of periodic traffic that have different QoS requirements for real-time control applications. The effectiveness of the proposed QoS-dif scheme is demonstrated through comparisons with the IEEE 802.11e EDCA mechanism.

Schools as meeting places : critical and inclusive literacies in changing local environments

Schools bring people together. Yet for many children there are major discontinuities between their lives in and out of school and such differences impact on literacy teaching and learning in both predictable and unpredictable ways. However if schools were reconceptualised as meeting places, where different people are thrown together (Massey, 2005) curriculum and pedagogy could be designed to take into account students’ and teachers’ different experiences and histories and to make those differences a resource for literacy learning. This paper draws on a long-term project with administrators and teachers working in a school situated in a site of urban regeneration and significant demographic shifts. It draws particularly on the ways in which one teacher re-positioned her grade 4/5 students as researchers, designers and journalists exploring student and staff memories of a school. It argues that place, and people’s relationships with places, can be a rich resource for literacy learning when teachers make it the object of study.

High-stakes literacy tests and local effects in a rural school

High-stakes literacy testing is now a ubiquitous educational phenomenon. However, it remains a relatively recent phenomenon in Australia. Hence it is possible to study the ways in which such tests are reorganising educators’ work during this period of change. This paper draws upon Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography and critical policy analysis to consider this problem and reports on interview data from teachers and the principal in small rural school in a poor area of South Australia. In this context high-stakes testing and the associated diagnostic school review unleashes a chain of actions within the school which ultimately results in educators doubting their professional judgments, increasing the investment in testing, narrowing their teaching of literacy and purchasing levelled reading schemes. The effects of high-stakes testing in disadvantaged schools are identified and discussed.

What are the health needs, familial and social problems of Thai migrants in a local community in Australia? A focus group study

This study explored the health needs, familial and social problems of Thai migrants in a local community in Brisbane, Australia. Five focus groups with Thai migrants were conducted. The qualitative data were examined using thematic content analysis that is specifically designed for focus group analysis. Four themes were identified: (1) positive experiences in Australia, (2) physical health problems, (3) mental health problems, and (4) familial and social health problems. This study revealed key health needs related to chronic disease and mental health, major barriers to health service use, such as language skills, and facilitating factors, such as the Thai Temple. We concluded that because the health needs, familial and social problems of Thai migrants were complex and culture bound, the development of health and community services for Thai migrants needs to take account of the ways in which Thai culture both negatively impacts health and offer positive solutions to problems.

Bailing out the FEG : is the Fair Entitlements Guarantee (formerly GEERS) approaching its own fiscal cliff?

This article discusses what recent statistics and public reports reveal about the funding of GEERS (now the FEG) and its bottom line. The article examines (1) whether there has been a “blowout” in the scheme which guarantees the recovery of employee entitlements in liquidations and (2) what might be done to put the scheme on a firmer fiscal footing.

iRAP Malaysia training course: Decade of Action for Road Safety. Report to Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia-Malaysia Institute

The International Road Assessment Program (iRAP) is a not-for-profit organisation that works in partnership with governments and non-government organisations in all parts of the world to make roads safe. The iRAP Malaysia pilot study on 3,700km of road identified the potential to save 31,800 deaths and serious injuries over the next 20 years from proven engineering improvements. To help ensure the iRAP data and results are available to planners and engineers, iRAP, together with staff from the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q) and the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (MIROS) developed a 5-day iRAP training course that covers the background, theory and practical application of iRAP protocols, with a special focus on Malaysian case studies. Funding was provided by a competitive grant from the Australian-Malaysia Institute.

Comment on "Local accumulation times for source, diffusion, and degradation models in two and three dimensions" [J. Chem. Phys. 138, 104121 (2013)]

In a recent paper, Gordon, Muratov, and Shvartsman studied a partial differential equation (PDE) model describing radially symmetric diffusion and degradation in two and three dimensions. They paid particular attention to the local accumulation time (LAT), also known in the literature as the mean action time, which is a spatially dependent timescale that can be used to provide an estimate of the time required for the transient solution to effectively reach steady state. They presented exact results for three-dimensional applications and gave approximate results for the two-dimensional analogue. Here we make two generalizations of Gordon, Muratov, and Shvartsman’s work: (i) we present an exact expression for the LAT in any dimension and (ii) we present an exact expression for the variance of the distribution. The variance provides useful information regarding the spread about the mean that is not captured by the LAT. We conclude by describing further extensions of the model that were not considered by Gordon,Muratov, and Shvartsman. We have found that exact expressions for the LAT can also be derived for these important extensions...

Cold-formed steel columns subject to local buckling at elevated temperatures

Fire safety design of building structures has received greater attention in recent times due to continuing losses of properties and lives in fires. However, the structural behaviour of thin-walled cold-formed steel columns under fire conditions is not well understood despite the increasing use of light gauge steels in building construction. Cold-formed steel columns are often subject to local buckling effects. Therefore a series of laboratory tests of lipped and unlipped channel columns made of varying steel thicknesses and grades was undertaken at uniform elevated temperatures up to 700°C under steady state conditions. Finite element models of the tested columns were also developed, and their elastic buckling and nonlinear analysis results were compared with test results at elevated temperatures. Effects of the degradation of mechanical properties of steel with temperature were included in the finite element analyses. The use of accurately measured yield stress, elasticity modulus and stress-strain curves at elevated temperatures provided a good comparison of the ultimate loads and load-deflection curves from tests and finite element analyses. The commonly used effective width design rules and the direct strength method at ambient temperature were then used to predict the ultimate loads at elevated temperatures by using the reduced mechanical properties. By comparing these predicted ultimate loads with those from tests and finite element analyses, the accuracy of using this design approach was evaluated.

A public asset management framework for Indonesian local governments

The decentralisation reform in Indonesia has mandated the Central Government to transfer some functions and responsibilities to local governments including the transfer of human resources, assets and budgets. Local governments became giant asset holders almost overnight and most were ill prepared to handle these transformations. Assets were transferred without analysing local government need, ability or capability to manage the assets and no local government was provided with an asset management framework. Therefore, the aim of this research is to develop a Public Asset Management Framework for provincial governments in Indonesia, especially for infrastructure and real property assets. This framework will enable provincial governments to develop integrated asset management procedures throughout asset‘s lifecycle. Achieving the research aim means answering the following three research questions; 1) How do provincial governments in Indonesia currently manage their public assets? 2) What factors influence the provincial governments in managing these public assets? 3) How is a Public Asset Management Framework developed that is specific for the Indonesian provincial governments‘ situation? This research applied case studies approach after a literature review; document retrieval, interviews and observations were collated. Data was collected in June 2009 (preliminary data collection) and January to July 2010 in the major eastern Indonesian provinces. Once the public asset management framework was developed, a focus group was used to verify the framework. Results are threefold and indicate that Indonesian provincial governments need to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of current practice of public asset management in order to improve public service quality. The second result shows that the 5 major concerns that influence the local government public asset management processes are asset identification and inventory systems, public asset holding, asset guidance and legal arrangements, asset management efficiency and effectiveness, and, human resources and their organisational arrangements. The framework was then applied to assets already transferred to local governments and so included a system of asset identification and a needs analysis to classify the importance of these assets to local governments, their functions and responsibilities in delivering public services. Assets that support local government functions and responsibilities will then be managed using suitable asset lifecycle processes. Those categorised as surplus assets should be disposed. Additionally functions and responsibilities that do not need an asset solution should be performed directly by local governments. These processes must be measured using performance measurement indicators. All these stages should be guided and regulated with sufficient laws and regulations. Constant improvements to the quality and quantity of human resources hold an important role in successful public asset management processes. This research focuses on developing countries, and contributes toward the knowledge of a Public Asset Management Framework at local government level, particularly Indonesia. The framework provides local governments a foundation to improve their effectiveness and efficiency in managing public assets, which could lead to improved public service quality. This framework will ensure that the best decisions are made throughout asset decision ownership and provide a better asset life cycle process, leading to selection of the most appropriate asset, improve its acquisition and delivery process, optimise asset performance, and provide an appropriate disposal program.

Perceptions and expectations for learning and development for older workers within Queensland local government councils : a case study

Current literature warns organisations about a global ageing phenomenon. Workplace ageing is causing a diminishing work pool which has consequences for a sustainable workforce in the future. This phenomenon continues to impact on local government councils in Australia. Australia has one of the world’s most rapidly ageing populations, and there is evidence that Australian local government councils are already resulting in an unsustainable workforce. Consequently, this research program investigated the role of older workers in the Queensland local government workplace in enabling them to extend their working lives towards transitional employment and a sustainable workforce in the future. Transitional Employment is intended as a strategy for enabling individuals to have greater control over their employment options and their employability during the period leading to their final exit from the workforce. There was no evidence of corporate support for older workers in Queensland local government councils other than tokenistic government campaigns encouraging organisations to "better value their older workers". (Queensland Government, 2007d, p.6). TE is investigated as a possible intervention for older workers in the future. The international and national literature review reflected a range of matters impacting on current older workers in the workforce and barriers preventing them from accessing services towards extending their employment beyond the traditional retirement age (60 years) as defined by the Australian Government; an age when individuals can access their superannuation. Learning and development services were identified as one of those barriers. There was little evidence of investment in or consistent approaches to supporting older workers by organisations. Learning and development services appeared at best to be ad hoc, reactive to corporate productivity and outputs with little recognition of the ageing phenomenon (OECD, 2006, p.23) and looming skills and labour shortages (ALGA, 2006, p. 19). Themes from the literature review led to the establishment of three key research questions: 1. What are the current local government workforce issues impacting on skills and labour retention? 2. What are perceptions about the current workplace environment? And, 3. What are the expectations about learning and development towards extending employability of older workers within the local government sector? The research questions were explored by utilising three qualitative empirical studies, using some numerical data for reporting and comparative analysis. Empirical Study One investigated common themes for accessing transitional employment and comprised two phases. A literature review and Study One data analysis enabled the construction of an initial Transitional Employment Model which includes most frequent themes. Empirical Study Two comprised focus groups to further consider those themes. This led to identification of issues impacting the most on access to learning and development by older workers and towards a revised TEM. Findings presented majority support for transitional employment as a strategy for supporting older workers to work beyond their traditional retirement age. Those findings are presented as significant issues impacting on access to transitional employment within the final 3-dimensionsal TEM. The model is intended as a guide for responding to an ageing workforce by local government councils in the future. This study argued for increased and improved corporate support, particularly for learning and development services for older workers. Such support will enable older workers to maintain their employability and extend their working lives; a sustainable workforce in the future.